Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman & Margot Robbie.
Three peroxide blondes step into a lift.
Barely a word is spoken, but so much is said.
The air is electric with tension.
One short scene from a movie.
You get the sense this is the tip of the iceberg.
You want to see more.
This is how movie trailers should be made.
Giorgos Lanthimos’ 18th century period drama, The Favourite was for many, myself included, the movie most likely to pick up Best Picture at the 2019 Academy Awards. Instead the big gong went to Green Book. (A very good, but not exceptional, film, in my opinion). There was some compensation with Olivia Coleman winning a most deserved Best Actress for her powerful and nuanced performance as the fragile monarch, Queen Ann. What really appealed to me about The Favourite was the way it turned some of the stylistic conventions of the period drama on their heads. Interesting use of fish-eye lenses, slow-motion film techniques as well as a racy script that felt determinedly 21stCentury. The liberal use of the c*** word seemed altogether shocking amidst the powdered wigs and lace finery.
In the opening scene the director quickly establishes the relationship between Queen Ann and her court favourite, Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz). The fact they have a secret connecting passage between their rooms is a quick clue that their arrangement is a unique one. Also established quite efficiently is that Queen Ann does not actually have any meaningful grasp of her nation’s state of affairs. The Queen gifts Lady Sarah a palace to reward her husband’s part in winning the war – here is the dialogue that ensues:
Lady Sarah: ‘It’s a monstrous extravagance, Mrs Morley (a pet name). We are at war.’
Queen Ann: ‘We won.’
Lady Sarah: ‘Oh, it is not over. We must continue.’
Queen Ann: ‘Oh? I did not know that.’
Another very delicate touch I noticed in watching the opening was the moment the crown is lifted from Queen Ann’s head. Olivia Coleman, in a supremely delicate and telling piece of acting that foretells that we are about to witness an extraordinary performance, made a slight and very subtle roll of her neck. Enough for us to know that she does not bear the burden of the crown with any comfort. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.*
*King Henry the Fourth. William Shakespeare.
Just finished reading William Boyd’s wonderful novel Love is Blind, the story of Brodie Moncur, piano tuner and romantic idealist, who escapes the repressive strictures of his tyrannical clergyman father in his home town of Edinburgh and finds himself on a journey of discovery that spans Paris, Nice, Vienna, St Petersburg and the Andaman Islands.
This new world is wonder enough for the naïve young Scotsman, but nothing has prepared him for what happens when he meets the beautiful Russian soprano, Luka Blum, (she calls herself Lika). The novel is subtitled: The Rapture of Brodie Moncur, and Boyd captures the all-consuming feelings that run through Brodie’s mind from the moment he sets eyes on Luka, through the early, clumsy encounters to the eventual physical consummation of love.
Here are some pivotal moments that track the romance between Brodie and Luka:
‘Brodie felt now as if his innards were molten – as if he might melt in a puddle of sizzling magma on the floor. What is it about this woman? How could a tall, Russian, mediocre opera singer be having this effect on him?’
‘It was a measure of the disturbance going on inside him – he had indigestion only, the champagne burning – this was the effect of being alone with Luka Blum.’
‘Was it the lips or was it the eyes? Or was it some more subtle equation of the face? The distance between eyes equalling the distance between nose and top lip? Or the precise setting of the lips between nose and chin… How did such fascination occur? One saw a thousand women’s faces in a month, say. Why was your eye – your heart, your loins – enthralled by just one?’
‘He imagined her naked. He imagined himself in bed with Lika, naked, entering her, staring down at that face surrounded by its unruly blonde hair. Those lips. Those hooded, sleepy eyes. He reached down and touched himself . Gripped himself. He looked at the ceiling then closed his eyes and thought of Lika.’
‘Brodie decided to walk home after his three hours in bed with Lika Blum. Dusk gathering as he walked along the boulevard Saint-Germain and turned to cross the Seine on the Pont de Sully. He walked like an automaton, a slight smile on his face, bemused, exultant, astonished at what had come to pass.’
Later in the story, Luka confronts Brodie in an encounter where she offers that his vision of her is deluded:
‘Look at your love for me. It’s blind. You don’t see me as I really am. All the many nuances of Lika Blum. The light and the dark. You just see the light. You just see what you want to see.’
If Brodie Moncur is truly unable to see Lika with anything other than through the romantically skewed lens of a lover’s eyes, let’s call it cupid-vision, he is offered some latitude for forgiveness when his eyesight is discussed later in the book.
‘Ah. You’re the Scotsman. They told me they had a Scottish piano tuner here.’ He looked at Brodie’s spectacles. ‘Are they efficient?’
‘Excellent, I’d be blind without them.’
‘Me too… Yes.’ He paused. ‘Blind as a worm. Is that what you say in English?’
‘Blind as a bat.’
Maybe Brodie’s comment there is all too prescient, he knows he is fully aware that he is blind, in more ways than one. The blindness of love, though, is not one that he, nor anyone, has any capacity to resist.
William Boyd, in the preface of the novel, quotes Robert Louis Stevenson:
‘Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause.’